Arte enquanto instrumento de luta: a obra London: A Pilgrimage, de Gustave Doré, e seus desdobramentos políticos e sociais

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the book “London: A Pilgrimage”, a work developed by the publisher, illustrator, caricaturist and artist Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883), together with the writer and journalist William Blanchard Jerrold (1826-1884), in a collaborative way, from an autonomous project that began in 1869 and sought to portray the architecture, culture, religion, experience and stereotypes of the different social classes present in London, through texts and images that were organized into 21 chapters and published by the publisher Grant & Co. in 1872. Although the book is a product of the intersection of their experiences on the same trip, both the writings and the engravings function independently, the result of the authors' artistic autonomy. Doré's pictorial choice, in line with the theme of the images and texts, most of which were dedicated to the working classes in factory settings and the most disadvantaged social classes in English society, meant that the book was politically unfolding. For this reason, this study aims to analyze the publication through a social and political approach in dialogue with the Social History of Art, drawing mainly on the theory developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) in conjunction with Italian historian Giulio Carlo Argan (1909-1992), in order to bring this 1872 work closer to an idea of "engaged art" from a diachronic contemporary perspective. Although this concept of "artistic engagement" originally dates back to 19th century expressionist realism, we will consider a current historiography to approach the past, updating it in a critical way, with some critical and poetic freedom